There’re some anti-virus programs for linux, but to tell you the truth, installing them it’s not worth it. If you run your programs with your user (only use root when you really need it) you won’t have any problems at all.

I never run an active antivirus and don’t generally think most users need one in linux land. That said, I do write security research code, and two good ones that work on linux are clamav and avg. From my own experience, if you care, I tend to prefer avg.

Regarding AUR, just glance over the buildfile to be safe. Generally any server can be open to compromise, but it would be a rather rare event.

Required? Not any time in the near future, that’s for sure. There are security issues that come up though, but usually with a program like openSSL, or a weak spot in the web browser, or a glitch with a piece used to generate random numbers for encryption. Stuff like that gets found and fixed really fast for the most part. You will probly never need to worry about an actual virus getting on your machine though.

Pretty sure my web browser gets the worst of it, so every so often I just save my bookmarks and uninstall it and the “profile” for it. Then I just load it up again and import my bookmarks. Probly don’t even need to do it, but I like a fresh untainted browser once, maybe twice a year.

Your biggest worry is getting an update for software that didn’t quite get all the bugs worked out of it, but a soon to follow update for it will come out to correct fix it.

They downloaded and ran some bad non community inspected program as root somehow. If you just load programs from the Arch and AUR(Arch User Repository) you will never ever have an issue. Getting on some .onion site and installing some random binary you found that someone says is something you want and just trust them is a no no.

If you just load programs from the Arch and AUR(Arch User Repository) you will never ever have an issue.

I wouldn’t say never. Although its very, and I mean very small, there’s still a chance for installing malicious code unintentionally using PKGBUILDs from the AUR. You should always read a PKGBUILD the first time you use it and for the first few updates after that. Then you can forgo checking it when updating if you like.

Do you think there will ever be a day when Linux is required to need an Anti Virus software?

Actually, no I do not think there will ever be a time where it will be required. Linux has a completely different underlying architecture for the system. You can’t accidentally install anything or accidentally run anything as root because both require your password and prompt you every time just to be safe.

They install something from an untrusted repo but blindly trust the package.

They don’t update their system for a very long time, years in fact.

Linux gets updates a LOT especially Arch systems but if there is a security problem then even Ubuntu and Debian will update very VERY quickly. If people ignore those updates then they can have a potentially vulnerable system.

Linux doesn’t have viruses right now much at all on the desktop because it is very hard to infect a Linux machine, however even if there were a ton of viruses it still wouldn’t matter if everyone did the “best practices” method of only installing from trusted sources.

As for the AUR, that is tricky because it is hard to tell for some people. In that case, here are some tips to be more safe.

check to see if the AUR packager has anything else in the AUR (if so then it means they aren’t a fly-by-nighter and it might be a good pkgbuild)

check to see if they have anything in the main official repos. (if they do, it is very likely it is only in the AUR for testing purposes and likely can be trusted)

Read the comments on the AUR entry, check to see if anyone is reporting errors.

Look at how many votes a package has, the more the better.

Finally, run pkgbuilds that you are unsure about in a Virtual Machine copy of your system that way if you mess up the VM it won’t matter.